Good morning, Whitewater.
Thursday in town will see scattered thunderstorms in the morning, and partly cloudy skies in the afternoon, with a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 6:28 AM and sunset 7:15 PM, for 12h 46m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 40% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1966, the first episode of Star Trek airs on NBC:
NBC ordered 16 episodes of Star Trek, besides “Where No Man Has Gone Before“.[18] The first regular episode of Star Trek,The Man Trap,[23] aired on Thursday, September 8, 1966 from 8:30–9:30 as part of an NBC “sneak preview” block. Reviews were mixed; while The Philadelphia Inquirer and San Francisco Chronicle liked the new show, The New York Times and The Boston Globe were less favorable,[24] and Variety predicted that it “won’t work”, calling it “an incredible and dreary mess of confusion and complexities”.[25] Debuting against mostly reruns, Star Trek easily won its time slot with a 40.6 share.[26] The following week against all-new programming, however, the show fell to second (29.4 share) behind CBS. It ranked 33rd (out of 94 programs) over the next two weeks, then the following two episodes ranked 51st in the ratings.[27][28]
Star Trek‘s first-season ratings would in earlier years likely have caused NBC to cancel the show. The network had pioneered research into viewers’demographic profiles in the early 1960s, however, and, by 1967, it and other networks increasingly considered such data when making decisions;[30]:115 for example, CBS temporarily cancelled Gunsmoke that year because it had too many older and too few younger viewers.[24] Although Roddenberry later claimed that NBC was unaware of Star Trek‘s favorable demographics,[31] awareness of Star Trek‘s “quality” audience is what likely caused the network to retain the show after the first and second seasons.[30]:115 NBC instead decided to order 10 more new episodes for the first season, and order a second season in March 1967.[18][32]
The Original Series was digitally remastered for a Blu-ray version in 2009. Here’s how that first episode, from 1966, looks when compared with the remastered and CGI enhanced version –
JigZone‘s daily puzzle is of ivy & a lamp: